Climate Activists Have Long History of Ducking Debates With Skeptics

In response to this ridiculous letter in the Guardian saying “we won’t share a debate platform with skeptics” Marc Morano writes:

Climate activists and scientists supporting the alleged “consensus” on man-made global warming have a long history of suppressing debate and intimidation scientists into silence. As a new round of calls go out to shut down scientific debate,

In 2007, a high-profile climate debate between prominent scientists ended with global warming skeptics being voted the clear winner by a tough New York City audience. The debate was sponsored by the Oxford-style debating group Intelligence Squared and featured a three-on-three debating format. Before the start of the nearly two-hourdebate, the audience polled 57.3% to 29.9% in favor of the proposition that global warming was a “crisis.”

But following the debate, the numbers had completely flipped to 46.2% to 42.2% in favor of the skeptical point of view, argued by MIT scientist Richard Lindzen, University of London professor emeritus Philip Stott, and the physician-turned novelist-and-filmmaker Michael Crichton. After the stunning victory, NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, one of the scientists on the losing side promoting belief in a climate “crisis,” excused the defeat by noting that his debate team was “pretty dull” and at “a sharp disadvantage” against the skeptical scientists. Scientific American agreed, saying the warmists “seemedunderarmed for the debate and, not surprising, it swung against them.” NASA’s Schmidt appeared so demoralized that he realized that debating skeptical scientists was not something he would ever want to do again. “So are such debates worthwhile? On balance, I’d probably answer no (regardless of the outcome),” Schmidt wrote.

In 2013, Schmidt was true to his word, refusing to even appear alongside skeptical climatologist Roy Spencer on John Stossel’s Fox TV program. Schmidt literally walked off the set when Spencer came on to talk.

Hollywood producer James Cameron, responsible for such mega hits as Titanic and Avatar, has also been a huge climate activist. Cameron once challenged skeptics to a public debate using the rhetoric of an Old West gunslinger: “I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads.”

In 2010, Cameron’s representatives reached out to me to assemble a skeptical debate team to face off against the producer at a public event. We agreed to the terms; Ann McElhinney and the late Andrew Breitbart were going to be joining me on the skeptical side of the debate.

I was flying to Aspen, Colorado, for the great global warming Wild West showdown when Cameron got cold feet and canceled the debate. At the very last moment, Cameron pulled the plug on a debate he himself had initiated and organized. When my connecting flight landed in Denver, I was informed that the debate was off. The official reason given by Cameron’s spokesman was that “Morano is not at Cameron’s level to debate, and that’s why it didn’t happen.Cameron should be debating someone who is similar to his stature in our society.” But the real reason had nothing to with “stature in society” and more to do with fear of losing a climate debate. Cameron backed out of the debate at the last minute after environmentalists “came out of the woodwork” to warn him not to engage in a debate with skeptics because it was not in his best interest.

I responded to Cameron’s last-minute debate ducking with this statement: “Cameron let his friends in the environmental community spook him out of this debate. When he was warned that he was probably going to lose and lose badly, he ran like a scared mouse.” Cameron had gone from Wild West gunslinger to chicken of the sea. But Cameron’s real failing is not his debate cowardice; it is his indifference to the needs of the developing world.

No Wonder Cameron Ducked Debates

In 2010, Cameron and actress Sigourney Weaver flew to Brazil to protest a dam that would be one of the world’s largest hydroelectric projects. Even then Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of the leftist Workers’ party, objected to Cameron’s attempts to keep energy out of the developing world and “argued that the dam will provide clean energy and is needed to meet current and future energy needs.”47 Cameron opposed a dam—now under construction—that will bring vital electricity to Brazilians. Cameron flew to the developing world to campaign against improving the lifestylesof its poor citizens.

But Cameron seems to be guided by his own form of utopian philosophy. “We are going to have to live with less,” the fabulously wealthy producer told the Los Angeles Times in 2010. Cameron, whose net worth was estimatedat around $900 million in 2014,49 warned that we face “a dying world if we don’t make some fundamental changes about how we view ourselves and how we view wealth.” He warned against the “consumer society where you buy something and then throw it away when you get the next new thing, filling up huge landfills with plastic and electronics.”Cameron also wants Americans to change their ways. “Honestly, the truth is, we have to revisit almost every part of our lives and our existence over the next few years. Energy consumption, I think, being the biggest one.

Energy and global warming are interlinked issues obviously,” the producer explained.But revisiting “almost every part of our lives” did not seem to impact Cameron’s personal life. He owned not one but two adjacent eight-thousand square-foot mansions in Malibu—and a submarine.